The Mask of Sanity. Hervey M. Cleckley

own mind.”

      He had related, in a rambling but impressive account, how Roberta at the age of ten stole her aunt’s silver hairbrush, how she repeatedly made off with small articles from the dime store, the drug store, and from her own home.

      “At first it seemed just the mischievous doings of a little girl,” he said, “a sort of play—and her not realizing about its being serious. You know how children sometimes tell a lot of fanciful stories without thinking of it as lying.”

      Neither the father nor the mother seemed a severe parent. In the opinion of their pastor and others who knew them well, they had no unusual attitudes toward their children. Roberta’s brother and two sisters were all well-behaved members of the community. The family was financially comfortable but not wealthy. There had been no black sheep in the group for the several generations during which they lived in a western North Carolina town with a population of 10,000.

      “We didn’t want to be too hard on Roberta when we first noticed these things,” the mother continued. “I’ve heard that too much punishment sometimes confuses a child and makes matters worse. We talked it over with Mr.——— (the pastor); with the superintendent of the school, and with all her teachers.” There was nothing to suggest that this girl had been spoiled. The parents had, so far as could be determined, consistently let her find that lying and stealing and truancy brought censure and punishment.

      “She never seemed sly or crafty,” the mother said, a little puzzled about how to express the impression, “not like the sort of person you think of as stealing and being irresponsible. Roberta didn’t seem wild and headstrong.” Yet she often used remarkable ingenuity to conceal her misdeeds and to continue them.

      As she grew into her teens this girl began to buy dresses, cosmetics, candy, perfume, and other articles, charging them to her father. He had no warning that these bills would come. Roberta acted without saying a word to him, and no matter what he said or did she went on in the same way. For many of these things she had little or no use; some of them she distributed among her acquaintances. In serious conferences it was explained that the family budget had been badly unbalanced by these bills. As a matter of fact, the father, previously in comfortable circumstances, had at one time been forced to the verge of bankruptcy.

      In school Roberta’s work was mediocre. She studied little and her truancy was spectacular and persistent. No one regarded her as dull and she seemed to learn easily when she made any effort at all. (Her I.Q. was found to be 135.) She often expressed ambitions and talked of plans for the future. These included the study of medicine, dress designing, becoming an author, and teaching home economics in a nearby college. For short periods she sometimes applied herself and made excellent grades, but would inevitably return to truancy, spending the school hours in cheap movie houses, in the drug store, or wandering through shops stealing a few things for which she seemed to have neither need nor specific desire. She did not seem to be activated by any “compulsive” desire emerging against a struggle to resist. On the contrary, she proceeded calmly and casually in these acts. She experienced no great thrill or consummation in a theft nor found in it relief from uncomfortable stress.

      Twice in her early teens she alarmed her family by staying out all night, once after a Sunday School picnic, once after a small dancing party. With what seemed like disarming candor she had told the girls at whose homes she stayed that her family knew all about her plans.

      Such conduct of course suggests that she might be deliberately trying to hurt her parents. If so, Roberta herself was quite unaware of such a motive. As with her thievery, her truancy, and her running up of bills, one does not find a conscious drive of real significance. Roberta insists that she loves her parents. “They’ve made some mistakes with me,” she says, “but I’ve made a lot myself. I appreciate all they’ve done for me. Of course, I’ve learned my lesson now.”

      One of this girl’s most appealing qualities is, perhaps, her friendly impulse to help others. In the hospital she showed tact and kindness in doing small favors for seriously troubled patients. This did not seem pretentious or in any way staged. At home she had for years shown similar traits. She often went to sit with an ill neighbor, watched the baby of her mother’s friend, and rather patiently helped her younger sister with her studies. In none of these things was she consistent. She often promised her services and, with no explanation, failed to appear. An easy kindness seemed also to mark her attitude toward small animals. She would stop to pet a puppy, take crumbs out to the birds, and comfort a stray cat. Yet when her own dog was killed by an automobile she showed only the most fleeting and superficial signs of concern.

      “She has such sweet feelings,” Roberta’s mother says, “but they don’t amount to much. She’s not hard or heartless, but she’s all on the surface, I really believe she means to stop doing all those terrible things, but she doesn’t mean it enough to matter.”

      “Lots of times we thought she’d got on the right track,” the father said, referring to Roberta’s brief period of interest in church work. When seventeen she had voluntarily assisted the Director of Religious Education for a couple of months and talked about making a career of such work. She had seemed sincere and her informal talks to small groups of younger children in Sunday School made a most favorable impression. Even while engaged in these activities she was occasionally stealing and running up big bills which, by many subtleties, she concealed for a long time from her father.

      “I wouldn’t exactly say she’s like a hypocrite,” the father added. “When she’s caught and confronted with her lies and other misbehavior she doesn’t seem to appreciate the inconsistency of her position. Her conscience seems still untouched. Even when she says how badly she’s acted and promises to do better her feelings just must not be what you take them for.”

      Having failed in many classes and her truancy becoming intolerable to the school, Roberta, after several more petty thefts from classmates and teachers, was expelled from the local high school. Her family sent her to a boarding school of her choice, from which she wrote enthusiastic letters. Despite this expressed satisfaction, she ran away from school and could not be located for several days.

      After her return home it was found that she had cashed bad checks at school to obtain money with which she kept herself at a hotel in a town near the school and not far from her home. She knew several boys and girls there and had spent some time with them going to the movies and having dates. She had told a convincing story to the effect that her father was in town on business and that she had accompanied him. This explanation she made so blandly and with such casual laying in of detail that none of her friends or their parents suspected her of having run away. She borrowed sums of money from several people during this episode, telling them about all sorts of entirely unreal situations which made it necessary for her to have funds at once.

      She seemed entirely unworried, never by word or gesture giving indication that she might have something to hide or to be seriously worried about-No adequate motive for her leaving school could be brought out. Sometimes she spoke of dislike for a teacher, again of some girl’s having seemed snobbish, or, forgetting the other complaints, explained it all on the basis of having been so homesick. Such expressions she would later contradict thoughtlessly by praise of the school and statements to the effect that she had greatly enjoyed herself there.

      Since she first began to go out to parties Roberta had given her parents many sleepless nights. With the clear and accepted understanding that she must, like her friends, return home by 10:30 or 11 P.M., she often did not turn up until 1 or 2 A.M., and once or twice not until far later. Sometimes she would while away these post-midnight hours playing pinball and slot machines with several boys in small resorts about the edge of town. Once she rode on a motorcycle with a young man to another town fifty miles away and returned just before dawn. Disturbed by the usual talk about sexual irregularities in young people, her parents had serious discussions with their daughter. Privileges were taken from her, and, sometimes for a month or more after an especially gross act of disobedience, she was not allowed to go out with her crowd.

      Having long feared that Roberta would in such circumstances lose her virginity, the parents, after her episode of staying several days away from school at the hotel, prepared themselves for the worst. She, of course,